By Xinhua
Los Angeles : Intel Corp founder Gordon Moore and his wife Betty have donated $200 million to build the world’s largest optical telescope, according to media reports.
The telescope will have a mirror nearly 100 feet across and three times the size of the current record holder. The donation went to Caltech (California Institute of Technology) and the University of California, said the Los Angeles Times.
Caltech officials said matching gifts from two other institutions are expected to bring the total to $300 million.
The universities “are thrilled with the foundation’s confidence in the project, and we and our partners are eager to create a history-making tool that will allow us to see further into the universe than ever before”, said Caltech President Jean-Lou Chameau.
The final design for the Thirty-Meter Telescope, as it is called, is expected to be completed by March 2009, and the complete project by 2017.
Five sites, three in Chile, one in Baja, California, and one in Mauna Kea in Hawaii are being considered for the installation, said project manager Gary Sanders of Caltech.
The technology will be similar to that used in the twin 10-meter Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, currently the largest optical telescopes in the world.
The new telescope will feature a large central mirror comprising 492 individual hexagon-shaped mirrors, each about 4.8 feet across and about 1.8 inches thick — a little smaller and thinner than those in the Keck telescopes.
The telescope will also feature adaptive optics that will allow it to minimise distortions caused by atmospheric turbulence. Six laser beams will create bright “artificial stars” in a naturally occurring layer of sodium atoms high in Earth’s atmosphere.
Because the intensity of the artificial stars will be known, electronics will allow a small “deformable” mirror in the instrument’s light path to fluctuate 800-1,000 times per-second to correct for the turbulence.
With that correction, the Thirty-Meter Telescope will be able to achieve a resolution higher than that of the Hubble Space Telescope.
That will enable it to analyse light from the first star systems born after the Big Bang, determine the physical processes governing the formation and evolution of galaxies like our own Milky Way.
It will also help to study planet formation around nearby stars and make observations that test the fundamental laws of physics.